UNRULY OBSESSION WITH MEANINGLESS DETAIL

The work of my dear colleague David Schoffman has been publicly rebuked by yet another member of the exalted art academy. No less an authority than the esteemed scholar, Dr. Chantalle Bograve, best known for her seminal work, Sacred Awe: The Fotzekunst Movement 1920 -1922, has appeared recently on television opining with her usual bluntness.

"Unruly obsession with meaningless detail," is how she summed up Schoffman's recent work. A fair assessment perhaps, but an unkind cut nonetheless. David has been laboring  for the past ten years over a series of  100 paintings turgidly titled The Body Is His Book and to concede the points made by Professor Bograve would render Schoffman's life work a hopeless sham.

ENCOMIUM FOR A FORGOTTEN MASTER

 

 El Fresco que se Arremolina, Micah Carpentier 1971

On a recent trip to Cuba, David Schoffman and I paid a courtesy call to Wilgefortis Carpentier, widow of the late painter Micah Carpentier.  Over a delicious lunch of churrasco estilo cubano and fufu de plátano Wilgy shared loving reminiscences of her dear departed soul-mate. Laying around her modest apartment on Calle Mercaderes are some of Carpentiers finest paper bags. Señora Carpentier maintains what little remains in Cuba of her husband's work with great devotion and care.

The great revelation of this most recent trip was our discovery of El Fresco que se Arremolina at the Instituto Vocacional Ezra Pound. On the northeast main wall of the student lounge, poorly lit and partially obscured by two sofas and a small magazine rack is a majestic mural painted by Micah Carpentier shortly before he died. Measuring approximately 7 feet by 28 feet, it is an impressive performance of painterly bravura by a man, addled at the time by arthritis and mental illness.

At this writing, a team of researchers, curators and restorers are busy arranging for the work's transfer to Havana's Museo del Arte Agradable. It goes without saying that Wilgefortis Carpentier receives no compensation for anything of her husband's work that generates any income.

CLOAKED IN CIRCUMSTANCE

 

The oddities of human nature can be uncomfortably observed in the conduct of my dear friend David Schoffman. He is both a gregarious social animal and a detached, withdrawn hermit crab-like recluse. His imprint is at times as silent as a scout. Other times his grassy tongue insinuates itself with unmodulated bluster. He is the classic flaneur and as chaste as a cleric. He has a persistent longing for the luster of artistic immortality as well as an unhealthy penchant for needless self-abnegation.

In short, he is an eccentric.

While he broods within the warm breast of his poorly lit studio he regularly formulates groundless surmises about the future of art.  He is the author of countless unpublished treatises and manifestos portending our cultural pratfalls, delivery from which only he can provide. 

He is the subject of an upcoming film by Pepo Cendrars whose last effort was a blood libel of inaccuracies about me and my career. I doubt David will fare better in the hands of this invidious documentarian.